The Invention of Morel Page 7

  It did not really matter very much to me what Morel was going to say. But I was disturbed by the arrival of the ship, and Faustine's imminent, irremediable departure.

  As I walked through the large assembly hall, I saw a ghost- copy of the book by Belidor that I had taken two weeks earlier,- it was on the same shelf of green marble, in exactly the same place on the shelf. I felt my pocket; I took out the book. I compared the two: they were not two copies of the same book, but the same copy twice; the light-blue ink on both was blurred, making the word Perse indistinct; both had a crooked tear in the lower corner. I am speaking of an external identity—I could not even touch the book on the table. I hurried away, so they would not see me (first, some of the women,- then, Morel). I walked through the room with the aquarium floor and hid in the green room, behind the screen of mirrors. Through a crack I could see the room with the aquarium.

  Morel was giving orders.

  "Put a chair and table here."

  They put the other chairs in rows, in front of the table, as if there was going to be a lecture.

  When it was very late almost everyone had arrived. There was some commotion, some curiosity, a few smiles,- mostly there was an air of fatigued resignation.

  "No one has permission to be absent," said Morel. "I shall not begin until everyone is here."

  "Jane is not here."

  "Jane Gray is not here."

  "What's the difference?"

  "Someone will have to go and get her."

  "But she's in bed!"

  "She cannot be absent."

  "But she's sleeping!"

  "I shall not begin until I see that she is here."

  "I'll go and get her/7 said Dora.

  "HI go with you," said the bushy-haired youth.

  I tried to write down the above conversation exactly as it occurred. If it does not seem natural now, either art or my memory is to blame. It seemed natural enough then. Seeing those people, hearing them talk, no one could expect the magical occurrence or the negation of reality that came afterward (although it happened near an illuminated aquarium, on top of long-tailed fish and lichens, in a forest of black pillars!).

  Morel was speaking: "You must search the whole building. I saw him enter this room some time ago."

  Was he referring to me? At last I was going to find out the real reason why these people had come to the island.

  "We've searched the whole house," said a naive voice.

  "That doesn't matter. You must find him!" replied Morel.

  I felt as if I were surrounded now. I wanted to get away, but I did not dare to move.

  I remembered that halls of mirrors were famous as places of torture. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable.

  Then Dora and the youth returned with an elderly lady who appeared to be drunk (I had seen her in the pool). Two men, apparently servants, offered to help; they came up to Morel, and one said, "Haven't been able to find him."

  "Haynes is sleeping in Faustine's room," said Dora to Morel. "It will be hard to get him down to the meeting."

  Was Haynes the one they had been speaking about before? At first I did not see any connection between Dora's remark and Morel's conversation with the men. The latter spoke about looking for someone, and I had felt panic-stricken, finding allusions or threats in everything. Now it occurs to me that these people were never concerned with me at all. Now I know they cannot look for me.

  Can I be sure? A sensible man—would he believe what I heard last night, what I believe I know? Would he tell me to forget the nightmare of thinking that all this is a trap set to capture me?

  And, if it is a trap, why is it such a complex one? Why do they not simply arrest me? I find this laborious method quite idiotic.

  The habits of our lives make us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. Now reality appears to be changed, unreal. When a man awakens, or dies, he is slow to free himself from the terrors of the dream, from the worries and manias of life. Now it will be hard for me to break the habit of being afraid of these people.

  Morel took a sheaf of yellow papers filled with typed copy from a wooden bowl on the table. The bowl also contained a number of letters attached to clippings of advertisements from Yachting and Motor Boating. The letters asked about prices of used boats, terms of sale, addresses where they could be seen. I saw a few of them.

  "Let Haynes sleep," said Morel. "He weighs so much—if they try to bring him down, we shall never get started!"

  Morel motioned for silence, and then began tentatively, "I have something important to tell you."

  He smiled nervously.

  "It is nothing to worry about. In the interest of accuracy I have decided to read my speech. Please listen carefully."

  (He began to read the yellow pages that I am putting into this envelope. When I ran away from the museum this morning, they were on the table,-1 took them with me.)[4]

  "You must forgive me for this rather tedious, unpleasant incident. We shall try to forget it! Thoughts of the fine week we have spent here together will make all this seem less important.

  "At first, I decided not to tell you anything. That would have spared you a very natural anxiety. We would have enjoyed ourselves up to the very last instant, and there would have been no objections. But, as all of you are friends, you have a right to know."

  He paused for a moment, rolling his eyes, smiling, trembling; then he continued impulsively: "My abuse consists of having photographed you without your permission. Of course, it is not like an ordinary photograph; this is my latest invention. We shall live in this photograph forever. Imagine a stage on which our life during these seven days is acted out, complete in every detail. We are the actors. All our actions have been recorded."

  "How shameful!" blurted a man with a black moustache and protruding teeth.

  "I hope it's just a joke," said Dora.

  Faustine was not smiling. She seemed to be indignant.

  Morel continued, "I could have told you when we arrived: 'We shall live for eternity.' Perhaps then we would have forced ourselves to maintain a constant gaiety, and that would have ruined everything. I thought: 'Any week we spend together, even if we do not feel obliged to use our time profitably, will be pleasant.' And wasn't it?" He paused. "Well, then, I have given you a pleasant eternity!

  "To be sure, nothing created by man is perfect. Some of our friends are missing—it could not be helped. Claude has been excused; he was working on the theory, in the form of a novel with theological overtones, that man and God are at odds with one another,- he thinks it will bring him immortality and therefore he does not wish to interrupt his work. For two years now Madeleine has not been going to the mountains,- her health has been poor. Leclerc had already arranged to go to Florida with the Davies."

  As an afterthought, he added, "Poor Charlie, of course—"

  From his tone, which emphasized the word poor, from the mute solemnity and the changes of position and the nervous moving of chairs that occurred at once, I inferred that the man named Charlie had died; more precisely, that he had died recently.

  Then, as if to reassure his audience, Morel said, "But I have him! If anyone would like to see him, I can show him to you. He was one of my first successful experiments."

  He stopped talking as he appeared to perceive the change in the room. The audience had proceeded from an affable boredom to sadness, with a slight reproof for the bad taste of mentioning a deceased friend in a light-hearted recitation,- now the people seemed perplexed, almost horrified.

  Morel quickly turned back to his yellow papers.

  "For a long time now my brain has had two principal occupations: thinking of my inventions and thinking about—" The sympathy between Morel and his audience was definitely re-established.

  "For example, as I open the pages of a book, or walk, or fill my pipe, I am imagining a happy life with—"

  His words were greeted with bursts of applause.

>   "When I finished my invention it occurred to me, first as a mere exercise for the imagination, then as an incredible plan, that I could give perpetual reality to my romantic desire.

  "My belief in my own superiority and the conviction that it is easier to make a woman fall in love with me than to manufacture heavens made me choose a spontaneous approach. My hopes of making her love me have receded now,-1 no longer have her confidence; nor do I have the desire, the will, to face life.

  "I had to employ certain tactics, make plans." (Morel changed the wording of the sentence to mitigate the serious

  implications.) "At first I wanted to convince her that she should come here alone with me—but that was impossible: I have not seen her alone since I told her of my love—or else to abduct her; but we would have been fighting eternally! Please note, by the way, that the word eternally is not an exaggeration."

  There was a considerable stir in the audience. He was saying—it seemed to me—that he had planned to seduce her, and he was trying to be funny.

  "Now I shall explain my invention."

  Up to this point it was a repugnant and badly organized speech. Morel is a scientist, and he becomes more precise when he overlooks his personal feelings and concentrates on his own special field; then his style is still unpleasant, filled with technical words and vain attempts to achieve a certain oratorical force, but at least it is clearer. The reader can judge for himself: "What is the purpose of radio? To supply food, as it were, for the sense of hearing: by utilizing transmitters and receivers, we can take part in a conversation with Madeleine right in this room, even though she is thousands of miles away in a suburb of Quebec. Television does the same thing for the sense of sight. By achieving slower or faster vibrations, we can apply this principle to the other senses, to all the other senses.

  "Until recently, the scientific processes for the different senses were as follows:

  "For sight: television, motion pictures, photography. "For hearing: radio, the phonograph, the telephone.[5]

  "Conclusion:

  "Until recently science had been able to satisfy only the senses of sight and hearing, to compensate for spatial and temporal absences. The first part of my work was valuable because it interrupted an inactivity along these lines that had become traditional, and because it continued, logically and along almost parallel lines, the thought and teachings of the brilliant men who made the world a better place by the inventions I have just mentioned.

  "I should like to express my gratitude to the companies that, in France (Societe Clunie) and in Switzerland (Schwachter, of Saint Gallen), realized the importance of my research and put their excellent laboratories at my disposal.

  "Unfortunately, I cannot say the same of my colleagues.

  "When I went to Holland to consult with the distinguished electrical engineer, Jan Van Heuse, the inventor of a primitive lie-detector, I found some encouragement and, I must add, a regrettable attitude of suspicion.

  "Since then I have preferred to work alone.

  "I began to search for waves and vibrations that had previously been unattainable, to devise instruments to receive and transmit them. I obtained, with relative facility, the olfactory sensations; the so-called thermal and tactile ones required all my perseverance.

  "It was also necessary to perfect the existing methods. My best results were a tribute to the manufacturers of phonograph records. For a long time now we have been able to state that we need have no fear of death, at least with regard to the human voice. Photography and motion pictures have made it possible to retain images, although imperfectly. I directed this part of my work toward the retention of the images that appear in mirrors.

  "With my machine a person or an animal or a thing is like the station that broadcasts the concert you hear on the radio. If you turn the dial for the olfactory waves, you will smell the

  jasmine perfume on Madeleine's throat, without seeing her. By turning the dial of the tactile waves, you will be able to stroke her soft, invisible hair and learn, like the blind, to know things by your hands. But if you turn all the dials at once, Madeleine will be reproduced completely, and she will appear exactly as she is; you must not forget that I am speaking of images extracted from mirrors, with the sounds, tactile sensations, flavors, odors, temperatures, all synchronized perfectly. An observer will not realize that they are images. And if our images were to appear now, you yourselves would not believe me. Instead, you would find it easier to think that I had engaged a group of actors, improbable doubles for each of you!

  "This is the first part of the machine,- the second part makes recordings; the third is a projector. No screens or papers are needed; the projections can be received through space, and it does not matter whether it is day or night. To explain this more clearly, I shall attempt to compare the parts of my machine with the television set that shows the images from more or less distant transmitters,- with the camera that takes a motion picture of the images transmitted by the television set; and with the motion-picture projector.

  "I thought I would synchronize all the parts of my machine and take scenes of our lives: an afternoon with Faustine, conversations with some of you; and in that way I would be able to make an album of very durable and clear images, which would be a legacy from the present to the future; they would please your children and friends, and the coming generations whose customs will differ from our own.

  "I reasoned that if the reproductions of objects would be objects—as a photograph of a house is an object that represents another object—the reproductions of animals and plants would not be animals or plants. I was certain that my images of persons would lack consciousness of themselves (like the characters in a motion picture).

  "But I found, to my surprise, that when I succeeded in synchronizing the different parts of the machine, after much hard work, I obtained reconstituted persons who would disappear if I disconnected the projecting apparatus, and would live only the moments when the scene was taken; when the scene ended they would repeat these same moments again and again, like a phonograph record or a motion picture that would end and begin again,- moreover, no one could distinguish them from living persons (they appear to be circulating in another world with which our own has made a chance encounter). If we grant consciousness, and all that distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by my machinery.

  "When all the senses are synchronized, the soul emerges. That was to be expected. When Madeleine existed for the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine herself was actually there."

  I have shown that Morel's style is unpleasant, with a liberal sprinkling of technical terms, and that it attempts, vainly, to achieve a certain grandiloquence. Its banality is obvious:

  "Is it hard for you to accept such a mechanical and artificial system for the reproduction of life? It might help if you bear in mind that what changes the sleight-of-hand artist's movements into magic is our inability to see!

  "To make living reproductions, I need living transmitters. I do not create life.

  "The thing that is latent in a phonograph record, the thing that is revealed when I press a button and turn on the machine —shouldn't we call that 'life7? Shall I insist, like the mandarins of China, that every life depends on a button which an unknown being can press? And you yourselves—how many times have you wondered about mankind's destiny, or asked the old questions: 'Where are we going? Like the unheard music that lies latent in a phonograph record, where are we until

  God orders us to be born?' Don't you see that there is a parallelism between the destinies of men and images?

  "The theory that the images have souls seems to be confirmed by the effects of my machine on persons, animals, and vegetables used as transmitters.

  "Of course, I did not achieve these results until after many partial reverses. I remember that I made the first tests with employees of the Schwachter Company. With no advance warning, I turned
on the machine and took them while they were working. There were still some minor defects in the receiver; it did not assemble their data evenly,- in some, for example, the image did not coincide with the tactile sensations,- there are times when the errors are imperceptible for unspecialized observers, but occasionally the deviation is broad."

  "Can you show us those first images?" asked Stoever.

  "If you wish, of course; but I warn you that some of the ghosts are slightly monstrous!" replied Morel.

  "Very well," said Dora. "Show them to us. A little entertainment is always welcome."

  "I want to see them," continued Stoever, "because I remember several unexplained deaths at the Schwachter Company."

  "Congratulations, Morel," said Alec, bowing. "You have found yourself a believer!"

  Stoever spoke seriously, "You idiot—haven't you heard? Charlie was taken by that machine, too. When Morel was in Saint Gallen, the employees of the Schwachter Company started to die. I saw the pictures in magazines. I'll recognize them."

  Morel, trembling with anger, left the room. The people had begun to shout at each other.

  "There, you see," said Dora. "Now you've hurt his feelings. You must go and find him."

  "How could you do a thing like that to Morel!"

  "Can't you see? Don't you understand?" insisted Stoever.

  "Morel is a nervous man; I don't see why you had to insult him."

  "You don't understand!" shouted Stoever angrily. "He took Charlie with his machine, and Charlie died; he took some of the employees at the Schwachter Company, and some of them died mysteriously. Now he says that he has taken us!"

  "And we are not dead," said Irene.